Many surgical and therapeutic procedures require an accurate, up-to-date representation of a patient's localized internal regions. For example, radiation therapy has successfully treated various cancers, including prostate cancer, lung cancer, and brain cancer, by delivering radiation to a specified region in quantified dosages. While higher doses may be more effective in disrupting the cancer, higher doses may also severely damage surrounding tissue. Similarly, dispersing the radiation into healthy regions may lessen the desired effect upon the unhealthy region. Sonic and drug delivery mechanisms may suffer similar complications.
Many prior art systems adopt a manual and often error prone means of determining the correct association. This process may involve careful tracking of fiducial identifiers during the implantation process and using this information to assign the identifiers to the corresponding measured coordinates of the fiducial at treatment planning time. Such approaches are error-prone and often have deleterious consequences.
Accordingly, there is a need for accurate, efficient, and reliable systems and methods for associating implanted fiducials with their planned counterparts.
The headings provided herein are for convenience only and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the claimed embodiments. Further, the drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be expanded or reduced to help improve the understanding of the embodiments. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments. Moreover, while the various embodiments are amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the embodiments are intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the disclosed embodiments as defined by the appended claims.